Friday, September 19, 2014

Tonight's Sky for September 19: NASA Recovers its NERV (1960)

On this
date in 1960, NASA successfully recovered the Nuclear Emulsion
Recovery Vehicle (NERV), which provided vital practice for tracking
and recovering a manned space capsule, which is something that NASA
would be doing within a year. Obviously, if one is going to launch an
astronaut, tracking the return capsule and picking up the astronaut
is vitally important. With NERV, NASA launched a capsule over 1,200
miles into the air and 1,300 miles downrange and promptly recovered
the vehicle. At the time, this was a new record.